Looking for my childhood tamagotchi

Hi all, I'm trying to find my old tamagotchi but I'm not having too much luck atm

I remember having this on the backside



But it's not the dinopet, it was yellow with 4 buttons, one button was for sound on/off, and it always died at the same age, 9 or 12 years old, one of the two, I can't remember right now.

The form factor was more similar to the dinkie dino than to the normal egg shaped tamagotchi.

And I bought it in Spain (well my parents did), so if anyone can help me find it I would be very happy.

Cheers

Hi and welcome to TamaTalk! I didn't have any dinosaur virtual pets myself as a youngster, but I knew others who did, so let's try to do some digging!

To start off with, since the Tamagotchi is Bandai's virtual pet brand, and you're looking for a virtual pet that was created by another company, using this name might be a hindrance as "Tamagotchi" isn't a generic term.

The fixed age for dying reminds me of the MGA VR Creatures line - those only have a very short lifespan of 9 days that doesn't vary by whether you got the good-care, middling-care, or bad-care adults, and they did come in a few shell formats (meaning that it's possible that a four-button version exists) and have a graphical style similar to the Dinopet, as you've shown. I have the MGA Penguin (they all play pretty much the same), so I do know these pets - did your dinosaur require you to fill up a discipline bar even if it had done nothing wrong?

For four-button dinosaur pets, the first one that springs to mind for me is the Dino Baby (also sold as the MicroPet Baby Dino), which is a dinosaur pet that uses the Gyaoppi programming (Gyaoppi is basically a loose "family" of virtual pets that came from a number of manufacturers who licensed this programming for their products) - however, I don't know if this particular shell is similar enough to the Dinkie Dino to be a match, and I don't know of any Gyaoppi virtual pets with a short fixed lifespan.

Another pet, which might match both the fixed lifespan and four-button Dinkie Dino-style shell, as well as the place that it was bought, is the Hitorikko Dinosaur, which this video shows was sold in Spain as the "Pocket Dino". Hitorikko pets were inspired by the Dinkie line, and have a fixed lifespan of 8 days (which is shorter than the Dinkies' 11 days).

I hope that these ideas might help you to get further with your search!

Hi, thank you so much for your answer. I've done some digging with the info you gave me and the most similar one I've found is the MGA VR Godzilla although the T Rex Dino looks very similar too. Since it's been so long though I can't remember if the game was the same for example, but anyway, these two are the closest thing I've seen so far. Do you know if there's a website with all the MGA VR listed? Although I think it's going to be impossible to find the one I had as a child because it was probably a knockoff.

I actually don't know if all of the MGA pets are listed somewhere, though I do know that a few are mentioned on Tamenagerie's Oddpet pages ("oddpet" is another community term for non-Bandai virtual pets).

Anyway, you never know! Every now and then people pop up around here who post these fantastic collections, and people recognise virtual pets that they thought were long since forgotten. I don't know if that will happen in this case, but it might be worth checking out old threads where people were looking to get things identified, or just looking to share their collections. This one, posted a couple of years ago by member @Porg, might be worth checking out to see if anything rings any bells, just because the collection is so huge.

I think I've found it!



I've asked the seller on Ebay if he knows the name but no answer yet. If anyone knows it please let me know!

Bitcointothemoon said:

I think I've found it!



I've asked the seller on Ebay if he knows the name but no answer yet. If anyone knows it please let me know!

Click to expand...

Progress!

Going by the pictures, my guess here would be that we're looking at either a Nano Dino clone or an MGA Dino clone.

I tried to look for more pictures of this one with no luck, but I did find this 2017 blog post about an MGA Dino clone called the "Cool Dino", whose shell looks somewhat similar to this one.